What do we call 'Body Event'?
Daniel Roy
This expression “body event”, as defining the symptom, can be found in the text Lacan submitted for inclusion in the proceedings of the 5thInternational Joyce Symposium in 1975, under the title “Joyce the Symptom”.[1]Here is the passage in question: “Let us leave the symptom to what it is: an event of the body, bound up with the fact that:one ’as it, one ’as it ov air, one ’as the aery’v it, one ’as it…From time to time this gets sung and Joyce does not forbear from doing so”.[2]Why does Lacan ask us to “leave the symptom to what it is”? Most simply, this could be taken as an indication not to separate the symptom in its ‘being’ from the ‘having’ of the body that characterises man. Does this imply that the body would thus not hold without the support of the symptom? And should the symptom, itself, no longer be considered without its “fastening” [son “accroche”] to the body?
Can we not find a first answer to these questions already included in the sentence itself? Lacan in fact indicates that “from time to time” the symptom “gets sung” in the non-sensical form of a childish refrain. Is it thus possible to hear, in the Ratman’s major obsession, in the bodily symptoms of Dora and the first “Freudian” hysterics, in the Wolfman’s compulsions, and in Little Hans’s horse phobia, “a little song” that constitutes the bone of it? It seems to me that, here, Lacan invites us to detach ourselves as analysts from the appeal to meaning exerted by the signifying chain, as such, in order to be receptive to the enjoy-meant, the joui-sensof the symptom as the speaking body’s little refrain, the air we have in our ears and that insists without reason, but not without resonances, the air out of which our base or aery’s made and our erring makes headway [erre]. The little song that guides our existence.
What Body?
If we take as our starting point the body as Lacan approaches it in an utterly renewed fashion in this text, which is contemporary to Seminar XXIII, The Sinthome,[3]we are struck by the assertion, repeated many times here, that man has a body and has only one; but it is a repetition that finds its support in the extraterritoriality between speech and writing, the efficacy of which Lacan demonstrates in this sentence by using a form of phonetic writing: “LOM, LOM at base, bockedy LOM who’s gotta body and Kun have just that one”.[4]He thereby brings about a fragmentation of meaning which literally explodes our inclination to understand this sentence and thereby transform it into banality. By uttering this sentence in this fashion, Lacan brings about what he is saying in act, he creates a ‘body event’, in other words a discourse event which is at the same time a jouissance event, by making it take a “bond de sens”, a “leapof meaning” [and also a “leap away from meaning”] – which is here opposed to bon sens,‘good sense’[5]– while making use of the same words. He thereby gives the model of interpretation, which is to use the same old words, while “crumpling” them a little, to make their value of enjoy-meant [joui-sens], suddenly appear. He manages to achieve this because he succeeds in linking together what he has produced throughout his teaching as enjoyed-sense [sens-jouit] about the body, namely the construction of three bodies arising from “three orders”: imaginary, symbolic and real. A sentence in this text brings them together to make it clear that man has but one body: what testifies to this, he says, is “the fact that he blabbers awayin order tobusy himself with the sphere from which to fashion himself an escabeau”.[6]It is very important for us here to grasp this insistence on Lacan’s part for the following reason: what he defines as symptom, is what happens (the event) to this body and LOM has only that, that one-body [un-corps], and has no other resources but that in order to recognise what is happening to him.
To the question “Qu’as-tu?”, “What’s wrong?”, literally: “What do you have?”, which serves the subject as a means to “fictively question himself”, but which sets us on the path, there is only one answer: “J’ai ça”,“I have this” [in the sense of “I have this or that complaint or malady”]. Let’s illustrate this simply: What is wrong with you crying, screaming, sulking, fretting…? To this the subject can only respond by declining a phenomenon of the imaginary body (anatomical, physiological), or a phenomenon of the symbolic body (mental or psychical), or a phenomenon which relates to the real of the body (which runs through him, that he runs up against, or that he is unable to say), in other words, he responds with a knowledge derived from current discourses and, if he is in analysis, he responds with his unconscious. These various body phenomena are registered as “body events” only in so far as they happen to the body that we have as one. When they are caught up in other discourses that bring them under control [les maîtriser], their event value is obscured. They are events, without Other, insofar as they say themselves in the treatment, because it is in this saying that their jouissance value is revealed, in a flash. It is in so far as they say themselves that the body rate [taux de corps][7]that they carry for the subject, without their knowing, is registered both for the person speaking and for the analyst: hysteric subjects are the ones who allow this to be grasped, they who, whether male or female, adapt themselves to the symptom in the other, who perceive it in another body. But this is what constitutes their drama, as they thus seek to extract themselves from what, at the end of his teaching, Lacan saw as the only limit that man has to deal with, his body, a limit which is also his sole responsibility.
Three body experiences
1. “The Sphere” or the effects of language on the imaginary body
The sphere is what Lacan reduces the imaginary body to at the end of his teaching, this body which, in the “Mirror Stage”, is called to identify itself as a unit, an image in which man recognises himself [se reconnaît], there where he is seen by the other who welcomes him. But in this very movement where the image unifies the fragments of the drive body, until then scattered, this image, the imaginary body, robs it of its being and delivers it to all manner of imaginary captations (rivalry, jealousy, competition). So when the body is constituted as an image, it no longer exists as a living body, this is what the mirror stage says, and the mark of the living is inscribed in this body as a lack, designated by Lacan as imaginary phallus. The subjective effects of language on the imaginary consistency of the body are twofold: on the one hand we have narcissism, a Freudian term, for which Lacan will substitute that of "adoration", and on the other, all the terms that in a language designate what is lacking in an image for it to be whole: “defect", "damage", but this can go as far as the hole in this consistency, by borrowing the anatomical holes. So, two effects of language on the imaginary body: 1) body worship; 2) lack in all its imaginary forms.
What is lacking does not register only as a "less" [en moins], but occasionally as a "too much" [en trop]. So we can add a third effect: 3) that which makes a stain, a physical stain or a moral stain.
2 - The effects of language on the body bestowedby the symbolic
It is fundamentally a body mortified by language, where the subject is represented by a signifier for another signifier; it is the body of the ancient burial, surrounded by various chattels of use and exchange, even other bodies over which the person buried had the right of enjoyment. Let us note here that these objects of jouissance do not in any way establish jouissance as absolute, but on the contrary as restricted, limited: "here is the scope of possible pleasures for a man, even if he is the most powerful among men!". In this perspective, that of the body bestowed by language, the mark of the living is a mark of division which strikes the subject, during his lifetime and even beyond his death – a division between the possibilities open to his desire and his pleasures, on the one hand, and on the other, a real impossible to locate. "To take it seriously, the body is first of all that which can bear the mark with which to classify it in a series of signifiers."[8]This mark, the symbolic phallus, designates the effect on the body of this incorporation of the symbolic body. It is both a negativation and a localization of jouissance, both a "no" [non] to jouissance - the castration effect - and a "name" [nom] - the unary trait. But there is something in the living body which does not allow itself to be negated, something that does not allow itself to be caught by a "saying no" [dire que non] and that therefore, in return, creates a hole in the symbolic, a hole in knowledge, "a hole that there is no way to know",[9]the sexual.
Two effects of language on the body of this symbolic mortification: 1) The mark, the coat of arms, the branding with a hot iron, which can make for a nomination; 2) A hole effect, which is subjectively registered as anenigma, fundamentally an enigma of the sexual.
But J.-A. Miller taught us to recognize the impact effect on the living body of the signifier all alone, which isolates itself in an order of speech that privileges nonsense, these mere tads of meaning [riens de sens], in dreams, slip-of-the-tongue, signifying equivoques, that is to say all the cast-off scraps [chutes] of discourse. This is where "the subject can realise that this unconscious is his", otherwise he can always think that it comes from the Other, which is the condition common to those who come to see a psychoanalyst. It is this knowledge, this unconscious – which is neither that of the laws of alliance and filiation, nor that of the master signifiers – “that affects the body of the being who can only make himself be through words, this to fragment his jouissance, to cut it up to the point of producing cast-off scraps of which I am the little object (a), the first a-cause of his desire ”.[10]These are the bodily effects of the signifier, no longer mortification, but effects of jouissance, a movement of "corporisation"[11]of language as it affects the living body. There is therefore a third bodily effect of language: 3) affect, essential for understanding the clinic of today.
It is in this moment of transition in his teaching that Lacan will condense these three bodily effects of language in its symbolic dimension through the verb "jaspiner" which in French denotes to blabber or chatter. This is the pure enjoyment of language in its materiality, in its "barking" because jaspineris derived from the word japper, "yapping" which denotes the little bark of the dog!
Not allowing oneself to be identified with the marks of the signifier as it circulates in this "chatter", not being caught in its dimension of semblance, leaves the subject delivered over to the drive objects that have come in their place: here he is at the focus of the gaze, or of mocking talk behind his back, he will get himself eaten up or rejected as waste. No longer having the means to cross the threshold of high school or college, this body can no longer lodge itself in this space woven from signifying marks and gets ejected from this place.
3 - We must speak here of these strands of jouissance, these bits of real, these bodily fragments that are objects (a).They are in fact the product of this "blabber[ing] … to busy oneself with the sphere" that constitutes the experience of an analysis. Taken from the jouissance of the body in the encounter with the demand of the Other of language, therefore stemming from drive objects, they locate and diffract this jouissance in these extensions that are the objects that cause desire, as precious objects hidden in the heart of the fantasy of the analysand, but also as objects of surplus-enjoyment that give a boost of pleasure to the body that one has [que l’on a]. These objects then designate "the real of the body" such as it crosses over into the imaginary sphere and into the signifying chatter. The effects of these "real" objects on the body accumulate 1) as "what is impossible to bear", as "what one collides with", "what cannot be said"; 2) as what falls, what is rejected, what emerges from the hole, or as what returns; 3) but also in the cyphering of language by the body’s drive means [moyens pulsionnels], oral, anal, scopic, invocatory cyphering of language such as we hear it in a very young child.
Making one’s escabeau
The body was first approached by Lacan as fragmented and unified as an imaginary body; it then presents itself as a symbolic body bestowed by language, which distributes jouissances and makes it the support of marks, condensers of jouissance; and it is finally produced as the real of a body fragmented by the "stupid" strike of language upon it. This is what makes Lacan say that it is language that traumatizes the body, insofar as it imposes this work of ciphering upon it, which will end up constituting phallic jouissance, which by the end of Lacan's teaching can just as well designate the jouissance of speech, sublimatory jouissance and surplus-surplus. This jouissance, which appears outside the body [hors-corps] in the sense of “outside” the “sphere” of the imaginary body, is nonetheless constitutive of the body of the speaking being in so far as it is made of an enjoying substance [substance jouissante].
This body "that man has" is thus fundamentally a body that "enjoys itself", that enjoys itself by all these means that are speech, objects of surplus-enjoyment, sublimation. Lacan will give a name to this body made up of enjoying substance, a body that operates neither in extended substance nor in thinking substance, a body which ex-sists with respect to physical space and mental space. A body that does not support itself with a “je suis”, an "I am ..." or with a “je pense”,an "I think" but with a "se jouit", an “enjoys itself”. The name given by Lacan to this one-body is that of escabeau, a body thanks to which everyone believes themselves to be beautiful, which serves each as a pedestal, that is to say also as anoccasion for falls. Thus, the escabeau is the very condition of the being who speaks, the man (LOM) who has no other being than the body that he has as one body [un corps], the "one" here designating the One of jouissance, which is what makes this escabeau hold up.
This balance is at once robust and fragile, as indicated by this sentence that serves me as a compass here: “he blabbers away in order to busy himself with the sphere from which to fashion himself an escabeau”.
It is robust and it readily registers as "character traits", as "personality", that is, habits, modalities of enjoyment.
It is fragile because this escabeau is based on a knot that, for a subject, has occurred haphazardly, in a contingent way, between a patchwork of images, scraps of speech and strands of jouissance.
It is a symptomatic knotting which contains in its heart the very contingency of the subject's presence in the world, a contingency which has taken on the absolute value of jouissance (the melancholic is confronted without mediation with this mark that makes a hole) and to which unconscious desire is articulated. This is what the hysteric deciphers about someone else's body. She reads in the symptom that affects the other body the index of the value of jouissance conveyed by desire as lack. She reads it equally well in the Other, in the discourse of the master, whose truth as a divided subject she reveals.
So, the symptom is the event that comes to affect that body, that affects the escabeau and shows its framework, its logic. It is in this sense that Lacan speaks of Joyce by saying that he "is symptomato-logy"; in fact, in his writing and in his life, he updates the logic of the symptom, "by making the rounds of his reserve" of escabeaux, while making himself a pedestal therefrom.
This symptom is the basis of a new clinic which is that of the bodily effects of language – effects produced in the imaginary consistency of the body, in its symbolic framework and in its real epiphanies. These symptoms, which we refer to as new, are to be constructed in the treatment as an event of the body of jouissance, which are the only real events in life, in a man's life.
A psychoanalysis can then be defined as the mechanism that allows you to make out of what determines you 1) something "that happens to you" as if you had chosen it, 2) to make what is happening to you into a symptom 3) as an event of the body, when an act of saying that bites into a mode of jouissance [unjouir] takes place in the analytic session. It is an event, as such contingent, in so far as it creates a knotting between a saying and a mode of jouissance "in order to fashion oneself an escabeau": this is how Lacan ends his sentence. To construct an escabeau out of the body of jouissance in its imaginary consistency, its symbolic hole and its surplus-enjoyment is to give yourself a chance of "scabeaustration", a castration of the escabeau, to use it in the right way, so as to learn to make use of the imaginary consistency, the symbolic hole, and its surplus-enjoyment.
Translated by Philip Dravers
References
[1]This Lacan, J. “Joyce the Symptom”, Trans. A. R. Price, The Lacanian Review 5 (2018), pp.13-18.
[2]Ibid. p. 17. translation modified. [T.N. The original French for this little ‘ritornello’ or refrain is difficult to render in English: l’on l’a, l’on l’a de l’air, l’on l’aire, de l’on l’a. The version published in TLR 5 is as follows: “Let us leave the symptom to be what it is: an event of the body, bound to how: y’aint without it, y’got it from thin air, y’air it, an aria y’ain’t without. Once in a while that gets sung, and Joyce doesn’t hold back from doing just that”.]
[3]Lacan, J. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XXIII, The Sinthome, trans. A. R. Price, Cambridge: Polity, 2016.
[4]Lacan, J. op. cit., p. 13
[5]Ibid. p. 14-15.
[6]Ibid. p. 14. [translation modified]
[7]Lacan, J. Le Séminaire, livre XVI, D’un Autre à L’autre, Paris, Seuil, 2006, p. 371.
[8]Lacan, J. “Radiophone”, Autres Écrits, Paris, Seuil, pp.408-409.
[9]Lacan, J. “The Seminar, Book XXI, R.S.I., lesson of the 8thof April 1975, Ornicar 20.
[10]Lacan J., « …Ou Pire, Compte rendu du séminaire 1971-1972 », Autres écrits, op.cit.,p. 550.
[11]Miller J.-A., « Biologie Lacanienne et événement de corps », La Cause freudienne N° 44, Février 2000, pp. 57-59